This pandemic has produced its own celebrities. Step into the limelight Jason Leitch, Scotland’s national clinical director and Devi Sridhar, the global public health professor at the University of Edinburgh, both of whom pop up almost daily on all our media platforms – although I’m not sure they agree on Covid-19 measures entirely.

Earlier in the month, Leitch described the standard test for Covid – the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR – as “a bit rubbish” because it couldn’t differentiate between live and dead viral antigens.

The test was invented by a rather eccentric US doctor called Kary Mullis and it won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was a child of the sixties. He loved surfing, he went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he took a lot of LSD, and which he described as a lot more important than any of the classes he took.

In his autobiography, he describes how he met the “standard extraterrestrial racoon” which glowed in the dark and which spoke English in his cabin in the woods of California. He strongly denied he was on an acid trip at the time.

The book is called Dancing Naked In The Mindfield and it must pretty much sum up what Leitch and Sridhar are feeling right now.

Forgotten legend

It’s sad how legends slip through the cracks of history. I hadn’t heard of Ian Steel, a champion cyclist and history-maker from Glasgow, until I read a book about an East German cyclist and his race against the Stasi, the secret police of the time, and his eventual defection.

Steel, who died in 2015, might be up there with names such as Tom Simpson or Bradley Wiggins, had he been born a decade later. He emerged into the public realm in 1951 when he won the 1,400-mile Tour of Britain – it was the first time he had been to England and it included three stage wins, one in his home city of Glasgow – and followed that with Scottish and British titles. Then, a year later and with British teammates, he set out to breach the Iron Curtain.

The Peace Race, dubbed, rather counter-intuitively, as the Tour de France of the East, was a Cold War attempt to relieve tensions in Eastern European countries which had been annexed by the Soviet Union in the Second World War. It was first organised in 1948. Winners did not receive prize money, but goods in kind.

In 1952, over 12 stages and 1,328 miles, much of it on poor or unmade roads, Ian Steel won the race at an average speed of 23.3mph. The British team won £2,000 of good. The Peace Race continued until 2006 and Steel remains the only rider from outside the Eastern Bloc to have won the race, his indelible mark on history.

Steel was, by all accounts, a shy man who became homesick abroad. He was married to Peggy, the sister-in-law of his mechanic on his Viking team. With Peggy there was clearly no homesickness abroad because the couple stravaiged much of the world, living in France, Spain and Gibraltar, before crossing the Atlantic in a yacht and criss-crossing North America in a motorhome.

The couple settled in Largs, and ran a bed and breakfast. They were married for 62 years until Ian’s death aged 86. What a man and what a life.

Droning on

A PAL of mine was hired by Amazon in the run-up to launching in the UK what they like to call their virtual assistant, Alexa. He, and others, went round the country, inviting people into what punters thought were focus groups, or market analysis, but they were actually taping them so Alexa could recognise local accents. I’m not sure how successful that was.

There’s been a lot of controversy over whether Alexa and its Google rival, Home, spy on us so that they can, in future, or perhaps even now, target advertising at us.

Well, they’ve come up with a new device, a flying camera drone called the Ring Always Home Cam, which takes off if someone breaks into your home and then streams the video to you when, presumably, you call the police. It’s launching in the US at a cost of $250.

Anonymous truth

During the week I received a trove of documents, anonymously obviously, from Anonymous. I presume the organisation has disseminated them widely to reporters and media operations. The documents, I guess leaked from within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, reveal a multi-million-pound propaganda operation to garner support for Syria’s political and armed opposition.

We knew much of what went on on the military front, but not how media operations were played. It seems, almost every major Western outlet was influenced by this government-funded disinformation campaign, from the BBC to the New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post.

The Assad regime was and is hideous. But the people we were arming and promoting, like the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, are Salafist war criminals, responsible for abductions, torture, summary executions and killing women in Idlib accused of adultery.

One of the main contractors funded by the FCO was ARK, which describes itself as a social enterprise, a humanitarian NGO. ARK boasted of overseeing $66 million worth of contracts to support pro-opposition efforts in Syria and “softening” the image of the opposition. It also played a crucial role in launching the White Helmets, the group of volunteer rescuers whom critics have called opposition propagandists.

A group of academics, including professors Tim Hayward and Paul McKeigue from the University of Edinburgh, claim that the alleged chemical weapons attack by Assad forces on Douma was fabricated and filmed by the White Helmets. I don’t know if that’s true or not but these documents will certainly provide fuel for their arguments.

There’s so much more. In war the first casualty is truth but rarely do we see it demonstrated in such a cynical and covert way, funded by UK taxpayers. There should be an inquiry and accountability. There won’t be.